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.The course outline projected that they would discuss nine political experiences: World War I, its aftermath on Western Europe, the Russian Revolution, the broader left-wing search for a new political order, the 1930s consolidation of the totalitarian regimes, World War II, the French Resistance, the Nazi death factories, and Hiroshima.129 The text of the course suggests that Arendt understood all of these experiences to depict how humans in the first part of the twentieth century perceived the emergence of this new modern world.Most of the typed sections of the course focus heavily on the meaning of the post–World War I era.The initiation of World War I shocked the world, resulting in an unexpectedly bloody and prolonged affair, and left the participants asking why it had been fought in the first place.130 The aftermath of the war saw the coming to consciousness of the “Lost Generation,” and Arendt believes that few generational nicknames have ever been as apt.131 The First World War saw the breakdown of the class system, when many of the old social distinctions got lost through postwar economic upheaval and the fact that elites and the lower classes were forced to work and fight shoulder to shoulder during the war.“The most important result,” Arendt writes, “the slate was swept clean, [and we saw] the terrible freshness (Sartre) that descended upon the world.”132 She claims that especially among the intellectual and social elites, the war left an unforgettable mark on their consciousness: “war as [a] liberating catastrophe from [the] bourgeois world of security … [the] sacrifice [of war allowed one] to show something for one’s life.”133 Arendt believed that the war had somehow brought the old world to its conclusive end, and the members of the Lost Generation somehow sensed that they existed in an odd in-between period before a new world had fully come into existence but after the old world had passed.This is the explanation for what she believed was a general trend in the early twentieth-century politics of ideology: the loss of self at the core of self-interest and desire to give oneself over to the movement of history in a mass movement.What the members of the Lost Generation were sensing was the coming of a new world: “nobody seemed sorry for the old world.Everybody seemed eager to build a new one … and those that wanted to go back to the old world … it was no longer there or they [no longer] fit into it.”134Since The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt had been fascinated by the life of T.E.Lawrence, and there are several pages in the lecture course that are nothing but excerpts from his collected letters.Noting his loss of self-interest, she quotes him saying that he had been “cured of any desire to do anything for himself.”135 Summarizing the ethos of the era as Lawrence exemplified it, she wrote in Origins that “the story of T.E.Lawrence in all its moving bitterness and greatness was not simply the story of a paid official or a hired spy, but precisely the story of a real agent or functionary, of somebody who actually believed he had entered—or been driven into—the stream of historical necessity and become a functionary or agent of the secret forces which rule the world.”136 “‘I had pushed my go-cart into the eternal stream,’” she quotes him saying,“and so it went faster than the ones that are pushed cross-stream or up-stream.I did not believe finally in the Arab movement: but thought it necessary in its time and place.” … Although Lawrence had not yet been seized by the fanaticism of an ideology of movement, probably because he was too well educated for the superstitions of his time, he had already experienced that fascination, based on despair of all possible human responsibility, which the eternal stream and its eternal movement exert [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]